Portland’s chiptune scene has grown up, but it still plays Game Boy.

My Game Boy sucks. Manufactured in 1992, it is a dirty,
yellowing gray. The “select” button is clogged with a mysterious black
goop, the batteries are held in with gaffer tape and only half of the
screen still works. When you turn it on, the trademark Nintendo “ping”
sounds drunk. But Matt Hunter’s Game Boy, circa 1990, is a spotless,
gleaming yellow. The buttons have been replaced with superior concave
versions from an NES controller. A neon red backlight makes the screen
glow in the dark. The audio output has been modified to plug into a PA
system. It sounds like a four-piece rock band is playing inside of it.

For Hunter, stage name Mechlo, the Game Boy isn’t just for playing Metroid II: Return of Samus;
it’s also an instrument. With a home-brewed cartridge in the back, he
plays the internal four-channel sound chip like a synthesizer. Onstage,
he plugs two Game Boys into a DJ mixer, tapping away at the buttons with
one hand, pumping his other fist in the air, floppy hair bouncing
against his black-rimmed glasses. For a bigger show, he might also play
his NES with a midi keyboard (and he’s currently experimenting with
adding a Sega Genesis).

“When
[people] see me get out my Game Boy and mixer, they look at me like
‘What the hell?’” Hunter says. “And then I hit my first song...and it
hits with this dirty wave-channel assault on the ears, and that’s where I
tell them: ‘Guess what? I’m not writing video-game music, guys.’”

Chiptune,
or chip music, can be difficult to take seriously at first encounter.
Its adherents make music using the sound boards from 8-bit video game
consoles—not just Nintendos, but Segas, Commodore 64s and Ataris.
Despite the genre’s roots, they’re not just aping classic video-game
soundtracks anymore. Although anyone over the age of 25 will probably
feel sentimental over the sounds, the music made by chiptune artists
runs the gamut from familiarly bouncy, bloopy pop tracks to rich, slow,
multilayered soundscapes.

“People haven’t been
making this music for a decade out of nostalgia,” says Hunter, who
organizes most of Portland’s chiptune shows and regularly promotes local
artists on his popular video-game podcast, A Jumps B Shoots.
“They really, truly love the sounds they’re making. And people haven’t
been fans of this for a decade out of nostalgia, they’re fans of people
who are making really amazing music...we’re all talented songwriters and
musicians.”

Take Ray Rude, he says. By day, Rude is the drummer for folk-rock band the Builders and the Butchers, WW’s
Best New Band of 2008. But armed with his Game Boys, a Roland Juno-106
synth and delay pedals, Rude moonlights as Operation Mission.

“It’s not about
trying to do songs that sound like video games,” says Rude. “I’m a huge
synthesizer guy, so when I realized the Game Boy was an analog circuit
you can manipulate, I was like, ‘Cool, I’m going to use that as a
sound.’” Operation Mission’s brand of chip music is a spacey, droning
electronica where the pixelated melodies seem to possess a particularly
menacing air.

Hunter and Rude are
two of about six guys—as with gaming and programming, chiptune is a
male-dominated community—who make up the core of Portland’s small but
devout chiptune scene. Unlike bigger cities, which Hunter says have
cohesive, identifiable “sounds,” Portland’s scene is characterized by
its eclecticism—from the wonky bloops and beats of circuit bender
Andreas to the schizophrenic IDM stylings of wunderkind Plain Flavored.
Also unlike the Seattles or New Yorks of the scene (New York’s annual
Blip Festival, the largest chiptune festival in the country, now lasts
three days and this year hosted 30 artists from around the world),
artists in Portland have struggled to capture even a slither of the
recognition their counterparts in bigger cities enjoy.

It’s ironic, says
Hunter, because Portland’s own festival, Micropalooza, started by
video-game arcade Ground Kontrol in 2003, predates those in most of the
country by several years. “Chip music was introduced into the United
States in 2001,” he says. “Blip Festival didn’t even start until 2006.
It’s incredible how initially [people at Ground Kontrol] were able to
think of something like this.”

But in the nine years
since the local festival began, Portland’s chiptune scene has not grown
with the same gusto. Each year, a similar lineup of chip musicians
gather at Ground Kontrol to play to a crowd of about 60 to 80 people.

It boggles the mind a
little: although electronic music has always been second fiddle to
Portland’s rock scene, a genre where one earns as much respect for
hacking a ZX Spectrum as writing a good melody, it seems a perfect fit
for a city that values open-source and DIY culture. The music being made
in Portland is on par with bigger-name acts in other cities, and most
in the local chiptune community seem to keep the faith that the audience
is here—they just haven’t discovered chiptune yet.

“It hasn’t found the
right exposure in Portland,” says Paul Owens, a co-founder of local
video production company 2 Player Productions, which captured the growth
of the chip scene nationally in its 2008 documentary, Reformat the Planet.
Owens’ company has brought some of the country’s biggest names in chip
music to play Portland in recent years. “The shows were amazing,” Owens
says. “But there were only 75 people there.”

What’s missing, he says, is a dedicated venue where people don’t just discover chiptune, they learn how to make it themselves.

“In New York there
was a place called the Tank, that every month would have a chip
night,” Owens says. “Seattle has the same thing. Portland hasn’t found
the right home, a DIY space people can come in and explore...’cause part
of the important thing is just getting people to make it.”

Hunter believes
seeing chiptune artists play live will convert the geeky young masses.
While most of the genre’s artists do make albums—and sharing them free
online is the norm—hearing songs blasting straight from the original
chips, watching 8-bit video projections and witnessing lots of
uninhibited “shitty dancing” is the ticket.

“People
need to hear it,” he says. “If you ask anyone in the programming scene
or indie game development, or even open-source, all of them know about
it—they just don’t leave the house, so they don’t go to shows! I love
them dearly, though, they’re my people.... I just wish they would come
out to see me and dance with me terribly.”